My January reads kind of bled into February (that’s what happens when you take a trip that starts in one month and ends in the next) so I decided to just drop them all here together!
I started the year with Chromophobia by David Bathcelor, which I loved! It explored the Western, modernist resistance to color in art, architecture, and design. If you’re looking for a good explanation as to why we’ve all been stuck in boring beige spaces, this is it!
Speaking of boring spaces, probably my favorite take-away from Beauty by Sagmeister & Walsh was a survey they did of their Instagram followers that found that brown was the least liked color and a rectangle the least liked shape, which they then followed up by pondering why so much of modern architecture is just boring brown rectangles. I really appreciated how this book questioned some of the most common assumptions from the last century. Plus, it’s a really visually engaging book.
There was definitely a theme to my January reading which encouraged me to pull Places of the Heart by Collin Ellard of my shelf. The books uses science to explore the ways that different spaces affect us. Some chapters resonated with me more than others, but overall I found it really interesting.
I balanced out my design-focused reading with Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald. I bought this book at the same time I bought H is for Hawk, but it took me a while to get into it. But I persisted, because I do love a good nature essay, and there were many of them in this book!
I had high hopes for Fixed by Amy E. Herman after a friend recommended it (and we’re usually consistent in the books we love) but I was actually a little disappointed in it. I think ultimately I wasn’t the right audience for it. (It seems more geared towards business people who don’t know much about art.) There were a few interesting kernels, but overall it didn’t quite do it for me.
Fortunately, the next book I read more than made up for it! I tore through Wanting by Luke Burgis in two days while I was in Palm Springs and then described it as one of the best business books I’ve read in a while. To be fair, it’s not exactly a business book. (It did leave me thinking about a Glennon Doyle quote I read, where she said that “When men write about themselves, it’s leadership. When women do it, it’s self-help.”) Categorization aside, this book looks at why we want what we want and the ways people around us (and that includes the Internet) influence that. The book asks us to really get to know ourselves so we can figure out what it is we really want, which felt like the perfect thing to read right before delivering two sessions of the Alignment Retreat for my mentorship program, Artists and Profit Makers.
The final book I read last month was Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. I had actually started this one before, right at the beginning of the pandemic, but my brain couldn’t fully process it then. I’m glad I gave it another chance because I think it should be essential reading for everyone. The book explores the impact of scarcity on our brains, from poverty to time scarcity to loneliness. (CN: I found the examples about dieting frustrating, mostly because it was a missed opportunity to explore the ways that diet culture is deeply problematic in creating the same reduced mental states as poverty or starvation.) Ultimately, the book looks at the ways that scarcity taxes our bandwidth and mental capacity. Not only is it a much better explanation for the problems of poverty, but I think it answers the reason so many of us have been suffering through a mental fog the past two years.
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